A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server.
A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices.
The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkable but so much of it is ultimately busy work that didn't need to be done if we regulated the consumer electronics market appropriately.
They’re 100% commodity hardware and fully locked down from any user freedom. Weirdly everyone focuses on Apple with all their might instead of gaming consoles.
Lifetime Xboxes sold: ~200 Million
Lifetime iPhones sold: 3 Billion
Why is it weird?
Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.
We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.
As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.
Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.
If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody
[1] Servers/Linux are the commercial vehicles in this analogy
That is not what the industry, that pays lobby money, wants. They want to be able to control what the user runs and extract profits.
For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things. Buy the products that suit your needs and wants, and companies have incentive to make them. And if no company wants to provide a feature or function that you know a huge portion of people will want, then you have a golden opportunity to start a business providing this.
We're talking Apple publishing specs for their hardware. That's not some "niche, particular, random" feature each persons asks for. We're all asking the same thing. Same thing that IBM did and what made the PC and IT industry as we know it.
> You've been misguided into following a false religion.
You're being misguided by your patronizing attitude.
Regulate what exactly? Bugs? That's what this was...
In any case, though, Apple agrees with you, and they explicitly built support for non-macOS OSes into the bootloader. This is a bug in the first developer beta of a new release.
"A foreign power could potentially deny access to the OS" sounds like a compelling argument.
Macs have always allowed you to run another OS.
iDevices have always had a locked bootloader.
People shouldn't confuse the two.
EU is the only governing body that would push owning the device you _buy_. Unfortunately their seem more geared moving to a surveillance state at the moment with chat control.
Because of this lack of documentation, every release of a new version of Apple hardware or software may require the restarting of the reverse engineering work, like in this case, just to keep working the alternative operating system.
The actual problem was that Apple has an undocumented APFS key for if a volume is bootable, which Asahi wasn't setting and Apple wasn't checking, but now they do, so they do.
if going through trouble means "doing less shit to lock their systems down", then yes.
Apple ultimately dgaf about linux.
When folks say Intel and AMD are done, and we should all be on ARM, or RISC-V, beware of what to wish for.
Yes there are device trees now, however someone has to keep them up to date, and that is only part of what makes a motherboard.
I agree with the ARM/RISCV stance that we should be cautious with what we ask. I have seen some RiscV providers in China are starting to push for a BIOS compatible boot system which is great to see, but there is no guarantee that it will be adopted or it will last for long.
I did not realize that some people were still so anti-Apple. I'm of course not saying that there's not a small element of truth in many of the comments, but talk about some straw man arguments.
However, when a company sells a device, as opposed to providing it for lease, I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage, like it should also not have the right to impose any constraints on how the owner should use what has been bought.
Obviously, the owner of any kind of things may not use them to perform illegal acts, but that is a constraint imposed by the valid laws, not by the seller of the things.
Today, far too many companies claim to sell things, but they also attempt to control what the owner may do with them. I avoid to buy such things, but my choices are limited by those who buy them, allowing these policies to be beneficial for the sellers.
> I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage.
This is an extremely broad requirement to place on any and all manufacturers. I agree companies shouldn't intentionally restrict what you can do with your stuff, but on the other hand, if you're trying to rebuild your lawn mower into a motorbike, you can't really be mad that the company didn't provide you with a specification the exact dimensions of the exhaust, can you?
People were screwed so many times by so many companies, they have been taught the hard way to behave like that: either make a lot of noise and hate in the first stage, or just agree that some functionality has been removed to milk more money etc.
"Concerned people are insane anti-Apple without any solid arguments, lol"
It's like they are looking at a specific application, finding that Macs are bad at it, and declaring it crap in every way, which isn't true.
Sure they don't do EVERYTHING we think they do, but they do so much, and so much more we DON'T know about...
Anyway, Apple could help the Linux team in months to close huge amounts of functionality gaps but ... they don't.
In my comment I simply noted that the comments there are extremely anti-Apple yet without any solid arguments behind them, and I also noted that the whole thing is just because of an APFS flag which could be fixed from Asahi's side. The main reason I made the comment is because I am shocked at how poorly backed the arguments are.
As for Apple not helping the Linux team, why would they, or any major OEM? Apple is perfectly happy with https://github.com/apple/container
> Turns out APFS has an undocumented "VolBootable" flag that we were never setting since, well, it is undocumented, and the boot picker never cared about it (it read it and printed it's state to system log, just did not take any action). Anyway, fix PR-ed to asahi-installer, old installs will have an installer option to set the flag. But still, probably hold off on installing macos betas :P.
I don't believe that Apple has ever acknowledged the project at all, let alone promote it. Apple is neutral towards their work as far as I can tell.
How do you draw that conclusion based on their public indifference? If they acknowledged it and promoted, you could assume they are pro Asahi. But them not acknowledging it doesn't imply they aren't anti Asahi.
If they actually wanted that project to succeed and bring more diversity to Mac dev ecosystem, they'd help the project outright. Meanwhile they continue to exploit Linux for their dev purposes while still locking you into the macOS. This is their clear strategy, i.e. to make you continue to use macOS even when you prefer Linux as dev platform, just based on what they showed during WWDC. They aren't neutral.
https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914716454526979
> I purposely designed a mechanism so that M1 Macs would retain the capability to boot completely arbitrary code instead of XNU if users wanted. But you have to 1) reboot to recoveryOS with a physical power button press and 2) put in your SEP-backed credentials.
> The challenge to running arbitrary code of course, as @marcan42 noted in his crowdfunding effort to getting linux on the M1, is that the SOC is undocumented, so you still have to reuse bits of XNU and/or reverse engineer a bunch of stuff.
> As one senior architect said "the contract is that there is no contract". So that Apple can change things to suit its own needs, not others', to build the best macOS experience, which is what most customers (besides y'all who follow me) are there for.
12.1 also added support for raw image boot, which was seemingly for, and has only been relevant to, making booting Asahi Linux easier. Discussion at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578 and an archive of the tweet's content below:
> Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they also added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os. And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.
On the other hand I doubt that's intentional. Even as an avid Apple critic I want to mention that people I trust and are more involved with Asahi, always pointed out that Asahi received the occasional little help from Apple devs where possible (surely, not with official documentation, or confidential infos).
So, I would wait until things had time to calm down and not get too invested with Apple bashing.
